Quench
It’s Jimi vs Jimmy - let the games begin
By Matthew Turtle and Tom Howard
Jimmy Page
Silence descends.
Jimmy Page produces a bow like Paul Daniels and begins to saw at his guitar.
“Eh?” Grunts John Bonham, his ape-like tendencies getting the better of him.
“Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.” Bonham ‘plays’ the drums in confusion to blot out the noise.
Robert Plant starts crooning in excitement thrusting his cod piece vigorously.
“Ahh, ahh, ahh, aw, ahh, ahh.”
John-Paul Jones surveys the scene with understandable confusion, plucking the D-string of his bass occasionally to earn his keep… A whole lotta Led.
Page played the guitar, Page threw riffs at faces, melted them and ate their essence. Page was about runes and spirituality man, he had his own sign (‘Zoso’) Page loved Aleister Crowley, Page loved fusion, Page fathered heavy-metal as well as many illegitimate bastards all over the world, Page chose Janis Joplin’s male equivilent to be his front man, Page was a dick…
I remember once upon a time strumming a twelve-string acoustic guitar in a music shop. Spotting a sale, the store’s proprietor sauntered over and told me how he loved to play a bit of twelve-string while the bath was running. He’d get naked, strum some Zepplin and hop in for his evening soak… Thanks Page, because of you I had to listen that.
Yes, he was famous within his own time, and hippies loved it through their drug-fueled prism but the fall out from that was the over-abundance of spandex, cringe-worthy tunes and pretentious forty-five minute solos that Page left us with, cheers for that.
Jimi Hendrix
“Hey, check this out.”
Jimi, naturally, plays a grossly over the top guitar solo, “Wait, wait, this bit’s the best, check it out.”
Finger tapping, yee fucking ha. “Brilliant Jimi, I’ve never seen anything like it, I don’t suppose you’ve got any actual songs though eh?”
He fiddles with his headband, adjusts his tie dyed curtain/drape/ shirt thing and looks confused. “Songs,” he mutters, “Yeah yeah, I got one, I got one, it’s about my friend Joe, we hooked up the other day, did shitloads of acid and had cast moulds made of our cocks, yeah, that was some fucked up shit man‚Ķ anyway, it goes like this‚Ķ “‚ĶHeeeeeeeey Joe‚Ķ”
Jimi Hendrix eh? What a prick. Okay, okay, he’s a legend, fine. But wait. It’s not that I dislike the man, and one must be careful not to speak ill of the dead, but he must surely be the most over-rated, self-obsessed, guitar-wanking, tie dye and headband wearing, best song was written by Bob Dylan, hippy entertaining eejit of all time.
Dylan may have refused to play All Along The Watchtower since Jimi’s supposed bettering of it, but Dylan declared Bono the greatest spiritual poet of our generation, so he’s clearly mental. There’s only so much of a grasp one can have on reality when a whole generation of Americans are on acid.
The very same acid that probably explains Hendrix’s inability to write anything like a good tune and for pumping cosmic guitar diarrhoea out at his live shows until the hippies were bored, panicking, and concluding “sod it, I’ll burn my bloody guitar, we’re all friends here anyway.”
Do not play with fire Jimi. Fire kills, Jimi. What a prick.
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